Watching, Still

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Watchers - Image © Kel Harvey

I agree wholeheartedly with A.E Housman that simply staring out at your surroundings is both a right and an absolute necessity; not solely for timely contemplation but also for good mental health,  and back-processing whatever your brain refuses point-blank to process when directly asked. I've spoken and written  before about my particular favourite spot and time for that simple, self-contained activity, in Corfu at Boukaris at sunset; a pleasure I won't have this year unfortunately. Still, I now have the time and I live in a beautiful place where similar qualities are not in short supply; the opportunities are there within walking distance.

On that note, we were out for a short stroll at Llanfairfechan this morning and I chanced upon these two chaps both engaged in their own idle contemplations of the landscape, the one in the distance staring down the length of the strand itself and the one on the sea-wall staring out to sea past the first.

There is a primitivity to the scene, despite the twentieth century concrete of the wall and the causeway that form both the physical and visual links between the two men. The openness of the implied narrative appeals to me, Ballardian in its starkness and timeless in its form.

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